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Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.
Beat Zen
Belson began working with conventional animation of drawings and cut-outs, and his first film Transmutation was screened at the second Art in Cinema Festival in 1947. Fischinger was so impressed with the sense of design and the dynamic structure of the black-and-white Transmutation that he wrote the Baroness Hilla von Rebay to recommend Belson for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Belson's second film, the 1948 Improvisation #1 (also black-and-white) confirmed his talent, and Rebay did give him a grant, which allowed him to travel to New York. There he encountered not only the wonders of the Guggenheim Museum, but also the "Lumia" color-light-phenomena of the Danish artist Thomas Wilfred. The Lumia produced supple polymorphous streams of changing colors either projected on large surfaces by the Clavilux console panel or in self-contained Lumia boxes which resembled television sets. The sense of non-geometric evolution of form and the incredibly lush color sensations in these Lumia projections inspired Belson. Back in San Francisco, he began creating color artwork on long scrolls, which contained not only sequential steps of movements, but also variations in textures from the repeated painting and air-brushing of similar shapes. His masterpiece of this technique, the 1953 Mandala, synchronizes these images to Balinese gamelan music that perfectly matches the glistening pointillist discs of the visuals with its metallic reverberations. At the same time Belson shot a brilliant film, Bop Scotch, for which he took single frames of pavement, decorative motifs, and textures found on the streets of San Francisco. Synchronized with lively bop music to reinforce the notion of a happy trip over familiar ground, the film contains an intense vision in which a studded manhole cover becomes a mandala -- the quintessence of the Beat Zen perception of sudden revelation in ordinary daily experience. Belson also animated two films for the Australian painter Patricia Marx, who had emigrated to California and had become good friends with Harry Smith. Using her painted images, Belson created a sense of motion by using the same single-exposure method as in Bop Scotch. In her film Obmaru, the images contain suggestions of hands and faces among abstractions, and give a certain sense of a Vodoun possession ritual. Her film Things to Come presents a pure abstraction in which the expressionist gestures of New York painters have been replaced with genuine motion. Moritz, William. "History of Experimental Animation." Website. Absolut Panushka, curated by Christine Panushka. (Jan-Apr 1997). |
